Application Goal Vs User Goal

Everytime I make a presentation to the Developers on the other side of the phone (i work remote) about the need of standards and patterns in UI, i hear that familiar phrase - “But why can’t users understand this trivial thing? It so obvious”. Yes its obvious for the person who invented the concept and not for the user.

So who is this USER? A different species from some alien planet? No not at all. Its someone as good as you and me. But then why all the frown about developing applications for the USER. Its because every application has certain goals.

> A business goal to meet specific certain business demands

> A user goal - how the user is going to achieve that business goal

Both of these are important. As all famous people always say “Let the specialists do the job meant for them”. So how come here, a business man becomes an advocate for all user types and defines the UI, how come a developer masks himself as a user and builds the UI, but who cares…its after all a user..whom nobody has seen or felt or known….All they can suppose he is as capable and as techy as anyone!

But then you release the product and there comes all the snowball effects

> User is not able to finish this TASK

> User does not go to this page at all

> User is stuck

> Application is not being used as we expect it to be

> Usage is dropping…of we are DOOMED….

So what is the best escape route now? and forever There are a few good practices: 1. As you kickstart a project, define the project’s audience and the project goal

2. Try to get a specialist to understand the project audience(users) and get a study report - which contains painpoints, what they dislike, what puts them down, who are they etc.,

3. Put a process in place that tightly has UI design built into it.

4. Put the UI patterns and Standards to use

5. Test it and roll it out

You now have a magic potion. Wow…Now you can see the graph going north….

Its true, tried and tested….